Thursday, February 12. 2009

When trying to get the latest sys-libs/timezone-data on a somewhat old system, I got the following error:

[list of nearly all files the package was about to install] - Package 'sys-libs/timezone-data-2008i' NOT merged due to file - collisions. If necessary, refer to your elog messages for the whole - content of the above message.

According to equery, it looks like those files were installed by glibc:

I looked at the ebuilds and saw that newer glibc packages depend on sys-libs/timezone-data, so upgrading glibc should solve the problem too. I've submitted bug 258802 since I didn't find the info anywhere else.

Then just select Tools > Extensions in Thunderbird and install the lightning.xpi you've just built (located in dist/xpi-stage/lightning.xpi).

UPDATE - 2007-06-28 - Lightning 0.5

After reading Matthew's comment I downloaded the newly released Lightning 0.5 from here, and built lightning-0.5-x86_64.xpi following the exact same procedure that I used for 0.3.1. Then I installed it from Tools > Extensions, restarted Thunderbird and immediately noticed the different appearance. (I did not uninstall 0.3.1 first, which apparently is ok.)

This allowed me to start GE in the first place. But then it was horribly slow, although glxinfo reported "direct rendering: Yes" etc.

When started from the console, GE would output the following:

do_wait: drmWaitVBlank returned -1, IRQs don't seem to be working correctly.
Try running with LIBGL_THROTTLE_REFRESH and LIBL_SYNC_REFRESH unset.

Doing a search led me to try setting LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 before running Google Earth. Indeed the warning disappeared, and GE was really faster. However, as soon as I would zoom too close, the whole screen was getting more and more sky-blue, until no image was being displayed anymore...

Finally, I found this article, and especially the comments from Eduardo Habkost and "Researcher".

I followed Researcher's instructions, and Google Earth is now working perfectly. For your convenience, I've put drm_nowaitVblank.c here to download (you cannot copy-paste from the original page because the parser there treats the includes as html code). Also to compile the code on amd64 you'll want to use gcc32 and not gcc...